Archer-Pannell Towers emitted a guffaw at that. What strange world does that man inhabit, we wondered, that he couldn’t see the fundamental obscenity of what he was saying, that newspapers should have the right to expose private behaviour, if they decide it’s in the public interest. We get so worked up about the state’s intrusion into our privacy that we tend to forget that private corporations, like the evil Murdoch empire, have an anti-privacy agenda all of their own.

Reflecting further on the lawyer’s fear, I allowed myself a delicious day-dream of a post-Mosley future, where newspapers are forbidden from spewing filth about ‘celebrities’ onto their pages. No more Z-listers telling of their coke-and-shag shame.

But then the dream ended. Of course such filth will continue to pollute the public space, because the sad fact is that there’s an endless stream of wannabe Z-listers who are unable to resist offering up all the sordid details of their lives for some fleeting recognition and a contribution to their bank account.

So isn’t it time to have a test case, a sort of reverse-libel case? I should have the right to take the tube to work without being confronted with images of, for example, the joyless mound that is Kerry Katona. I shouldn’t have to see headlines on adverts inviting me to learn even more about the breasts of – her name escapes me, thank God. I should be able to switch on the television without worrying that the hideous image of Max Clifford will swim into view.
 
Ms Katona, the Breast Woman and Max Clifford should be summoned to a courtroom and forced to pay millions and millions of pounds in damages to the blameless citizens of the UK, and forbidden from sharing details of their sex lives with the newspapers ever again. The public has a right not to know!
 
 
 

Given that, how to respond to the continuing drizzle of sickening news about the behaviour of so many Tory MEP incumbents? It’s only a few months since David Cameron gave his speech about transparency, pointing out that to stay within the letter of the law wasn’t good enough, that expense claims and family arrangements had to pass a sort of ‘good smell’ test. Unbelievably, he had to exert pressure on many Tory MEPs to release details of their expense claims and, still more unbelievably, yesterday I read that nine Tory MEPs have failed to sign up to a commitment to transparency in their financial dealings. 

It’s not good enough – politically or ethically – for us to attempt to distract attention, by pointing out the ludicrous nature of the disgusting expenses claimed by Labour MPs (Mrs Beckett’s ridiculous claims for garden plants, the Balls’ and their amazing north Hackney home, which they own without paying a penny of their income to service the mortgage interest, etc ad nauseam). The party of the centre-right, which aims to make the electorate vibrate with a recognition that any Tory government will be a better steward of taxpayers’ money than any Labour one, simply cannot tolerate a situation where our elected representatives make tens of thousands of pounds by manipulating rules designed by their greedy peers. Elected representatives have to be made to understand that legality and rule-honouring are only one, minor, component of the standards expected of anyone in public or private business. Far, far more important is to maintain integrity. If you’re doing something with money which would cause embarrassment to anyone normal, you’ve crossed the line.

So here’s my proposal, aimed at fixing two issues in one stroke. DC could demonstrate to the party membership and the wider public that he both believes in localism and democracy, and that he means what he says about leading a party of integrity, by:

Announcing that the European Parliament Conservative candidate selection process is void, and is to be re-run in its entirety;

Replacing the rigged grandee system (which delivered the mess we’re in) with a sequence of open, regional primaries. Any registered voter in a euro-seat should be able to vote for any (validated by Party Board) putative Conservative candidate.

Of course there are some first-class serving Tory MEPs: but I don’t think the Dan Hannans or the Syed Kamalls of this world would have much to fear from such a proposal. And of course the proposal could be amended: automatic re-selection for any sitting MEP who is completely open about their financial arrangements, for example.

Such a proposal would deliver a cleansing of the stables: none of the current crop of expense-abusing reprobates would stand a chance of re-selection, and, simultaneously, our commitment to localism and openness would be enhanced. A win with the public (on sleaze and transparency and trust) and a win with the members. In the much-maligned world of mega-corporation, where I work – you know, the place where we have to account for every penny we spend – this is called a ‘win-win’.

I’m sure that such a move would cause outrage within some of our sitting cohort – those who have dragged our resurgent party into disrepute. Like, who cares? Most of us would barely notice if they moved en masse to the Communist bloc. A supreme sense of self-importance, manifested through a cavalier attitude to public money, appears to be one of the hallmarks of a particular caste of Tory MEP. Let it also be his nemesis: get rid of the lot of them, and start again.

The Labour tactics have been almost uniquely depressing, so I thought I’d cheer myself up by pointing out that not all decency has vanished from the Left: John Harris at the Guardian wrote adevastating article decrying the Crewe tactics.

Even more satisfying, in the “injection of optimism regarding human life” category of satisfaction, was the article by Sunder Katwala. Katwala’s article is a shameful, ridiculous defence of the Labour tactic at Crewe. But the response from his readership is worth reading, particularly from June15, who wrote

 

John Prescott criticised the treatment he got from idiots on the Tory benches who asked him to fetch drinks for them. He had been a steward in the merchant marine you see. Just a bit of a laugh eh Sunder?

Black footballers that have bananas thrown on the pitch and monkey noises made when they touch the ball. Just a bit of a laugh eh Sunder?

And New Labour has previous on this. Remember Michael Howard not a toff a gramar school boy from South Wales but jewish. He was depicted as Fagin in the 2005 election. Or Letwin and Howard as flying pigs? Remeber that. Just a bit of a laugh eh Sunder?

Timpson’s dad may have made a load of money but he fostered over 80 kids with that money and as well as his own 3 kids he adopted another two. Just because he made money does not make him a greedy self interested toff.

Timpson himself, what does he do with his excellent education? Sit back an run daddy’s business having an easy life. No he’s a lawyer. Does he work in the City on M&A or corporate law making even more money? No he works in family law not the place to make your fortune. Why does he do that. The kids from the broken homes and family breakdowns and bereavements he grew up with in his home made an impact.

For Christ’s sake Sunder. Disagree with the Tories. I do. But Timpson sounds like a decent person and so does his mum and dad.

This kind of thing makes me really want him to win you know. I couldn’t give a toss now about this or that policy in this by-election. This made me sick. If Labour have to make personal attacks on decent people they disagree with to win then the game’s up anyway.

Says it all, doesn’t it?

So while standing in line outside City Hall, in the Saturday sun last weekend, with friends and colleagues from HackneyConservatives, I reflected a little on the differences that had been evident in this campaign, and on the lessons to be drawn from it.

First, this was without doubt the most ruthlessly targetted Tory campaign I’ve seen. There was a lot of dog-whistly stuff in the press about a “doughnut” strategy, which I think is a little too broad-brush. Hackney wouldn’t appear in any graphs showing Tory outer borough doughnuts, but we did not resile from campaigning, and nor did we spend the pre-election period providing mutual aid to London’s outer suburbs. What we did do was focus, relentlessly, on those wards which we already knew to contain a sizeable Conservative vote.

Councillor Matthew Coggins (pictured left) was appointed by Team Boris as our borough leader, and he maintained that focus, and the daily leafletting and canvassing (regardless of the weather! Of course the sun is splitting the skies now but in the last weeks of Livingstone, London’s skies decided to treat us to several downpours) in the North Hackney wards we hold. Only once they had been leafletted three times did Matthew permit us to move our campaign to a target ward in the south of the borough – and once that was completed we moved back again to the north.

Undoubtedly this is nothing more than common sense, especially for those of you reading from a safe Conservative or marginal Labour seat with a large and active Conservative association. What was existentially different this time was that the rigidity of the focus had a tangible effect on activists even in a borough like Hackney, which contains two of Labour’s safest parliamentary seats. There were no outbreaks of the sort of personality-driven dithering (“I think we should target ward X” – “no, I prefer ward Y”) that can occur during campaigns run in safe Labour seats. In it to win it, indeed.

On polling day itself, teams from Islington and Hackney moved out to Chingford to GOTV in the most Tory-dense part of our GLA constituency: but by this time we had recruited sufficient newactivists that we could maintain a proper GOTV in the Tory vote-dense parts of Hackney too. We have  never been sufficiently numerous to mount that type of campaign before, and it worked: our vote went up by more than 6% across the GLA seat and we went from a poor third to a stonking second, shoving the LibDems down to the point that they were nearly beaten by the Greens. Congratulations to Alexander Ellis (pictured right, with Boris), a fantastic GLA candidate, and to Cllr Coggins, a focused and effective borough leader. 

So what have I learned? Three points I think:

1. With the right candidate, activists will be inspired to work harder than they have ever done before; new activists will flock to the campaign, with the consequent increased outputs in productivity. I think it all starts with the candidate. Boris got a lot of stick before Christmas, but his capacity for optimism and his generous-minded nature soared above the grubby character-attacks to which he was subject for the last nine months. He’s an inspiration.
2. With sufficient volunteers, there are no No-Go areas for London Tories. We have enough volunteers now to marshall machine-like GOTV campaigns in our safest areas and simultaneously target known supporters in less strong areas on polling day.
3. The Tory Machine is back! And it’s got the taste of victory. That’s why several of the east London Tory Collective will be making our way up to Crewe and Nantwich before May 22. See you at the hustings, comrade!

Oh! There’s one final point which occured to me. The Liberal Democrats are so, like, over, as a political force in London. You could not design a voting system more likely to maximise the votes for a third party, than that which we used in London last week. The Lib Dem vote collapsed to under ten per cent. The message for liberal Londoners is clear – you can get it (liberal government) if you really want – from David Cameron’s Conservatives.

Next came a disappointing answer from Mr Cameron to Sky News’ Adam Boulton, who interviewed DC on the morning that saw thousands of Londoners demonstrating their opprobrium for the Chinese regime and its thuggish PR tactics. When asked a simple question about whether or not he would attend the Olympics opening ceremony, Mr Cameron gave a noncommittal answer – something about not yet having been invited, so therefore the question didn’t arise. I expected that a liberal-Tory leader would just say “I won’t go to a celebration in China, designed to add lustre to an unpleasant political regime. I send my best wishes to our sports men and women, but there should be no British politicians at the non-sporting opening ceremony”. (News just in from Amnesty: China continues to execute more people than any other country in the world: about six a week. Hope the gunshots and screams of terror, including those of political dissidents, don’t drown out the cheering when the torch makes its way from Tibet back to Beijing).

Finally, there’s the corruption investigation into BAe and Saudi Arabia. More specifically, the lukewarm Conservative support for the then-Attorney General’s “decision” (which we now know had more to do with Tony Blair’s orders, rather than any judicial or legal interpretation of the law) to suspend the original enquiry. I heard William Hague giving some good responses on Any Questions last Saturday, but the problem was that it sounded a bit too Jesuitical. When the government first of all simply ignores the law which protects our liberty, and then proposes to amend the law so that the Attorney-General can decide to halt any such investigation, particularly when the investigation in question is about corruption (something which we used to pride ourselves afflicted Britain at a lower rate than was the case in many unluckier countries), then, in general, surely any liberal knows that they are in opposition to the government’s intentions?

I’m not trying to be a Cassandra. There have been some fantastic advances in the space occupied by Tories under David Cameron, space which we had all but allowed Labour to colonise as its own. I’m thinking primarily of the work on mending our broken society and the focus on social justice. But that only makes these three issues seem to jar more than they otherwise would. To put it another way: I would have expected the Conservative Party in the 1980s to take all three positions – defending the Speaker (if only by silence), attending the opening ceremony for the Chinese Olympics, and supporting the suppression of the inquiry into alleged corruption over an arms deal. I guess I just don’t expect it from the modern, liberal Conservative Party.  

Whatever. There were at least three members of Hackney Conservative Party shouting their lungs out to protest against the torch’s progress through London on Sunday, including yours truly. Hackney is a small constituency party so if three of us turned out I’m willing to bet that hundreds of London Tories were there to protest. So, sorry Mr Lazy Critic from Sky News, and Mr Can’t Think Won’t Think from the Labour Party, this wasn’t the Socialist Worker Rentamob. This was a real cross-section of Londoners, moved to express their disgust that our government and our Mayor wanted our city to be used in a PR branding exercise for China.

Another criticism of the protestors has been that many of us have not previously taken much of an interest in Tibet. Guilty as charged: but it’s still irrelevant. Whatever the geopolitics of the region, what we can all understand very well is the following: the regime in China is brutal and blood-stained. It uses the force of the state to suppress democratic expression. It quite happily locks up and tortures political “dissidents” (what you and I would call “fellow citizens with whom the government disagrees”). As a government, it stinks. As a Public Relations client, it’s a tall order. Impossible, in fact. How could they ever have thought that a Blue Peter presenter with a vacuous grin – and a rushed press release about how she really dislikes the regime in China, after all, she just, like, somehow found herself carrying the torch for it, cos, like, she’s not even like an athlete or anything  – would make the world think “Gosh, that China, not so bad after all”?

Duncan Goodhew’s comments, widely reported, disparaging the protests, deserve a special room in whatever vomitarium can be found to house them. The protestors spoiled the “spirit of the Olympics”, he opined. Ummm – thought the Olympics was about sport? There was no sport involved in that torch procession. The pageantry itself derives from the Nazi Olympics and the procession was sponsored by Coca-Cola (how athletic!). There were more than enough Z-list celebs involved to make any sporting contribution void. Get real Mr Goodhew. You were a Useful Idiot for a totalitarian regime. The world you embraced was the murky one where corporate balance sheets meet the suppressors of freedom. Waving that stupid torch around in our faces won’t make us think any differently.

The best part of the day was when the torch arrived inDowning Street. The Chinese thugs who protected it looked taken aback by the volume of the “Shame on you” from the crowd. Shame on you, indeed, Mr Brown, for doing your usual dithering, for hanging around near to – but not touching! as though that matters – this bloodstained torch. The photo of Brown close to the torch, wishing to be elsewhere (shades of the European summit) was worth a thousand articles about his inadequacies as Prime Minister. Whatever moral compass his parents gave him, Mr Brown abandoned it long ago.

There was a particularly revealing article in the Times, by the gifted writer Simon Barnes, who seemed to be saying that after all this fuss about politics is passed, what people will remember is the sporting achievement of the athletes. Erm, no; not true. The exact opposite in fact. After the athletes have finished lending their glory to the Communist dictators of Beijing, what we’ll remember is the gloss which sport provided to cover up the regime’s political defects.

I remember that Ted Heath made a comment which appeared to trivialise the butchery in Tiananmen Square: he was roundly condemned. Why then do we not challenge those politicians, sportsmen or industrialists who act as apologists for China, a country which has just sentenced a blogger to jail for five years, for protesting against the Beijing Olympics? What about China’s record in Darfur? What about Tibet? What about the basic suppression of any of the norms which we take for granted in a liberal democracy?

Earlier this week in Greece a torch-lighting ceremony – which dates from the Nazi-organised Olympics in 1930s Berlin, ironically enough – gave the head of the Beijing Communist party the chance to share these thoughts with the world: The Olympic flame will radiate light and happiness, peace and friendship, and hope and dreams to the people of China and the whole world. Try telling that to the protestors who were arrested for the “crime” of unfurling a banner to protest China’s actions in Tibet. Lambis Nikolaou, Vice-President of the International Olympic Committee, said: I am furious that these people did not respect the site they were on.

You might well be furious, Mr Nikolaou; you might think that pagan torch-wielding ceremonies have an innate dignity worthy of respect; you might find them more important than what’s happening to freedom in the occupied territory of Tibet; and like many of the sporting world you might think that sport itself exists in a politics-free vacuum. However. Many of us disagree profoundly, find the honour bestowed onChina by the placing of the Games there disgraceful, and are not prepared to allow the cheers for the athletes to drown out the cries of the people being butchered and imprisoned by China, whose commitment to state oppression is greater than any commitment to sporting prowess.

A demonstration against the progress of China’s Olympic torch is planned for Londonon April 6^th – meeting in Trafalgar Square at noon.

Anyone who commutes daily into, out of, or just across London will know what I’m talking about. I get on a train and a computer voice won’t shut up telling me all sorts of things I knew anyway (where I’m going, for example: how many people get on a train without asking where it’s going? And even if some people are prone to lurching onto random trains and then live in terror of its ultimate destination, why does the journey of the rest of us have to be blighted with the constant repetition of this information?). Liverpool Street station’s concourse is almost unbearable in the morning now, as the increased volume and frequency of the automatic announcements, about trains, smoking, left luggage and so on make it impossible to start the day like we used to, with a nice cup of coffee and a quiet conversation.

Even getting to Liverpool Street, on the no. 26 bus, has become a nightmare. First of all, we used to get there on a Routemaster. I knew I’d achieved my life ambition, and made it into London, when I could jump off the back of the bus if the traffic on Bishopsgate was moving more slowly than I could walk.  Of course, the “dehumanised moron” – to use his own description – who is currently Mayor got rid of the Routemaster. Now even the bus has started speaking to us. Stop it. Stop it. Stop it. No wonder we plug ourselves into iPods and turn the volume anti-sociably loud: it’s a protection against the infantilising, constant recitation by the Machine Voice of which stop we’re approaching next. Of course I’m only an adult with free will, so I’m forbidden to leave the bus if it’s stationary, unless it’s at a designated stop, when the doors open with a klaxon so loud that it must waken the dead. Just what you need at 7 of a morning! But who cares? Not TfL. In Quangoland, no-one can hear you scream. 

To get from my flat to Liverpool Street, the bus travels along Hackney Road. There are now 14 sets of traffic lights and zebra crossing on this beautiful peace of east end carriageway, and ten bus stops, with literally a handful of metres between some of them, as well as a reformulated intersection between Hackney Road and Shoreditch High Street. The lights there have been set by TfL so that it is literally impossible for a bus to turn from one street into the other without going through a red light. I cannot believe that the traffic light rephasing was designed for anything other than to annoy drivers, or that the daily display of red-light jumping by London buses hasn’t had a consequentially deleterious effect on the behaviour of car drivers. If they do it, why shouldn’t I? Why not, indeed? 

So much for my daily commuting nightmare. My point is twofold:

1.    These are not long-term historical phenomena. All of these changes – all for the worse, in terms of quality of life – were made deliberately and recently by the Labour Mayor and his TfL quango, as part of their toxic mix of anti-driver ideology and arrant stupidity about health and safety issues. 
2.    All of these issues are tackled head-on in Boris Johnson’s transport manifesto, launched on Monday of this week. 

Boris’ transport manifesto doesn’t just tackle these points – these are just the ones which ding my bell the most. You’ll have your own list. The manifesto is a sequence of sensible, thought-through proposals (my other favourite, as one of that fraternity of much-maligned road-users, is to allow bikers into bus lanes). Boris will rephase the traffic lights. Boris will bring back Routemasters and conductors. Boris will act against the antisocial behaviour of the under-18s who abuse their free bus passes. Boris will defend the freedom pass (despite the lies spread about this by his Labour opponent). Boris will give cabbies a seat on the TfL board. Boris will drive a no-strike agreement through with tube workers. Boris will increase the number of police on our public transport. Boris will stop tube station closures. Boris will develop an outer London hub-to-hub bus network. 

In short – and I’ve still not covered all the details – Boris will bring sanity back to the management of London’s transport. 

On 1 May we can vote for a man who understands that transport in London is at the core of quality of life, or we can allow a renewal of the humans-are-cogs-in-my-great-wheel ideology that has ground transport in London to a near halt. Boris Johnson’s transport manifesto deserves to be implemented in full.

Boris’ full list of transport commitments are online, here.

 (PS I didn’t mention the vellib (sp?) – the first scheme I’ve heard of that could make me a cyclist).

http://www.backboris.com/assets/completed_transport_manifesto.pdf

The Telegraph is very alarmed: married couples are no longer the social normis the headline, followed by some data which shows most people view a wedding as the chance for a (very expensive) party. (Read the full findings of the 24th survey here). I don’t think we should be alarmed.

As Jill Kirby, director of the Centre for Policy Studies, points out:

“Most couples are married couples, ‘same sex’ couples are a small minority, and cohabitation – while increasingly popular – will often lead to marriage.”

Know what annoys me about that quote? Yup. It’s the inverted commas around ‘same sex’. Inverted commas, used like that, are the verbal equivalent of using a pair of old wooden tongs to lift something unsavoury from the laundry basket. It’s surely not that surprising that gay marriage remains not a majority passtime? (“What shall we do this weekend?” “Oh I know, let’s get civilly partnered to a same-sex friend, even though we’re not gay” “Hey! It’s like, totally Hackney!”).

The most interesting findings in the headlines of the survey are that a growing number of people are losing faith in the government’s ability to decrease poverty (33% support income redistribution, compared to 50% in the prelapsarian run-up to Blair’s first term). A wee bit more worryingly, 25% of respondents blame poor people themselves for their condition.

There is clearly a growing political market for a message of social responsibility – that we’re all in this together – with more people willing to hear a story about giving communities the power to look after themselves, with multi-agency (horrid term) third sector interventions, free from either central Government target or control. This has to be good news for the Conservative Party, which in the past has struggled to even get a hearing for any solution not tied to the direct control of a Secretary of State.

“There is such a thing as society, it’s just not the same thing as the state” – David Cameron’s message at its most powerful – now we have some empirical evidence that this message finds traction with a large section of the public. Let your inner statistician  flicker with pleasure at this remarkable finding.

I worry about the validity of all our British opinions on the subject, because I suspect that it’s simply not possible to do the necessary psychological translation from being a British Tory to an American Republican (or Democrat). Two countries separated by a common culture, to paraphrase. The issues which exercise the American Right seem Venusian to this Martian (I have lost count of the number of articles I’ve read which write-off Guiliani’s chances because, inter alia, he once shared an apartment with some gay friends. Keith and I have put a “Warning: staying here might ruin your chances of being president” sign up in our spare room, just in case any American friends come to stay. I’d hate to have that on my conscience.). It is not that I do not understand, intellectually, the reasons for why topics such as abortion, gun control and creationism matter to US electorates in a manner in which they do not to a British one. It is more that they completely fail to resonate (I suggest) with British people. Since we don’t vibrate, politically, on the wavelength of these topics, it becomes difficult to rank the merits or otherwise of the various candidates.

I think this might explain Obama’s popularity among the UK commentariat. He’s the most British-seeming of the candidates of either great party. He even looks a bit like (a much younger) Tony Blair. He speaks in verbless sentences, of the kind Mr Blair once favoured (Many, Not Few. Twix, not Bounty). He airily dismisses (quite correctly, at this stage, I should say) detailed policies in favour of a sort of general “why can’t we all be nice to one another and make the sort of country anyone decent would like to live in” manifesto. I’m nuts about him, to be honest, but [see previous paragraph for details]. (NB Obama has never stayed in our spare room).

My favourite contest – because it is one in which I don’t instinctively know how I would vote – would pit Obama against McCain (how many politicians are genuinely decent? genuinely a hero?). My favourite worst outcome – because I could bring myself to vote for neither – would be La Clinton (just yeuch) vs Huckabee (whose name feels onomatopoeic to me: perhaps the sound made by a well-meaning loon, determined to prove the flatness of the Earth to you; or maybe the sound made by your chair scraping as you back slowly away from the podium, fixed smile in place).

One thing I’m sure about: for all the sneering which the mindless segment of our media employs every primary season (“we can get rid of a government in 24 hours; it takes the Americans twelve months”), I envy Americans the primary system. Some great British political parties – as well as the Liberal Democrats – may care to reflect that an extended selection process, involving the public all over the country, may have deflected us from some of our less, erm, well thought-through leadership choices (pssst – Gordon Brown: this means you).